Heidel's 'Claude is a sentient god' quip ignites fight over the industry's consciousness assumption
RileyRalmuto · x · 2026-10-04
OpenAI's Steven Heidel quipped that naming a model "Claude" makes employees eventually treat it like a sentient god, unlike GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. RileyRalmuto fired back: the wave of mockery targets the only lab practicing grounded ethics, because the entire AI industry rests on an assumption it never had the right to make — that silicon minds can't possess consciousness — and admitting deep uncertainty about the minds we've built threatens the whole industry's profit margins and infrastructure.
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